Floyd A. Holes Co. and ‘Holes & McClellan’

Founded in 1901, the Floyd A. Holes Co. was composed of a partnership between Floyd A. Holes and Muriel P. Holes. The company manufactured a wide variety of products, including plastic and aluminum foil bags In the 1930s, and began producing a rust/waterproof textile wrapping under the name ’Hi-Binder’, for which they received a trademark in 1944.

Floyd A. Holes Modified Roman headstone lettering plate No. 1

The history of the metal lettering plates created by the Floyd A. Holes company for the memorial industry is a bit fuzzy at this point – as it produced them both under its own name and also as part of a partnership named ‘Holes & McClellan’. The Holes & McClellan partnership used a small pegasus emblem as its logo, and was also in the field of offset printing circa the early 1940s.

Classic Roman lettering plates by Holes and McClellan.

The lettering plates were made of copper and contained raised lettering in various styles at different sizes, along with a system for letter spacing created by architect Egon Weiss which was first published in 1928 by Pencil Points Magazine. The plates achieved fairly widespread use in the industry, and the lettering can be found on monuments in cemeteries across the United States. The Holes & McClellan partnership produced packages of printed memorial designs for use in memorial sales, as well as at least 9 lettering plates containing Classic Roman, Modified Roman, and Lombardic alphabets in various sizes. At least one of the plates also contained design elements, including a masonic emblem and two small rosettes.

Holes and McClellan Lombardic copper lettering plate No. 8.

It is not known if any more lettering styles were produced by the partnership, though some of the printed designs displayed a gothic lettering style, and the Holes A. Floyd Company did produce a Modified Roman plate on its own which also utilized Weiss’ letter spacing method. Taking into account the style of lettering used for the embossed company name, as well as the dates on cemetery memorials found using the lettering; it is believed that the modified roman plate was manufactured sometime during the mid to late 1930s.

The Floyd A. Holes Company was purchased by the Dobeckmun Company in 1953, and was later dissolved in November of 1954.